The short answer: yes. Factory Hiro is the real deal, buy and download it without fear, it is a worthy remake of the original, finally available with a touch interface where it can shine.

The longer answer: compared to the original, graphics have obviously been remade, but everything in the gameplay will otherwise be familiar. Redirection boxes that you tap to toggle between vertical and horizontal direction, the trash destination and the recycle stream (and of course the default final destination: the delivery truck), assembling steps that you sometimes have to turn on or off, etc. It’s all there. In particular, the regulation of assembly line speed so you get your quota done in time for the end of the day, but not so fast that you end up being overwhelmed by the oncoming components to manage, is still the fundamental challenge of the game.

A nicety was added, though: when some trash gets generated (“Oh No!”), the speed will automatically switch to slowest for you, so it is much easier to manage these crises when they come. Other differences exist, but are less significant.

In non-gameplay aspects, the story was changed as well; these days of course it is told as cutscenes (created by KC Green) depicting the titular Hiro proving his hierarchy that yes, he can get the job done. And you, will you succeed?

Factory Hiro is available on the iOS App Store, as well as on the Google Play store for the Android version, and on PC and Mac through Steam (I got it for 3.49€ on the French iOS App Store; pricing will depend on your region); it was reviewed on an iPad Air 2 running iOS 11.4.1.

P.S.: In similar nostalgia-inspired discoveries, I should mention that I can’t believe I went such a long time without being made aware of Contraption Maker, for the creators of The Incredible Machine; this matters beyond nostalgia, as The Incredible Machine is one of the best pedagogical tools disguised as a game that I have ever come across, and Contraption Make is a worthy successor, improving it on many points such as the addition of rotation physics (want to do a cat flap? You can now.) or more digital logic elements for laser computing than you can shake a stick at.

And the last such discovery is for Two Point Hospital, in which you will find everything you liked from the original Theme Hospital; I haven’t played it yet, but if you’ve played the original and the trailer doesn’t convince you, I don’t know what will.

Now I think it is worth going into what did come to pass. Apple is definitely going to port UIKit, an important part of iOS, to the desktop for wide usage; and these last few years have seen the possibilities improve for distribution of iOS apps outside the iOS App Store or Apple review, though they remain limited.

But beyond that? I got it all wrong. The norms established by the current Mac application base will remain, with apps ported from the mobile world being only side additions, there will still be no encouragement for sandboxing except for the clout of the Mac App Store, pointing with pixel accuracy will remain the expectation, most of iOS will remain unported, etc. You are all free to point and laugh at me.

And I can’t help but think: what a missed opportunity.

For instance, in an attempt to revitalize the Mac App Store Apple announced expanded sandboxing entitlements, with developers on board pledging to put their apps on the store. Besides the fact some aspects of the store make me wary of it in general, I can’t help but note this sandboxing thing has been dragging on for years, such that it ought to have been handled like a transition in the first place; it might have been handled as such from a technical standpoint, but definitely not from a platform management standpoint (I mean, can you tell whether any given app you run is sandboxed? I can’t) even though that could be a differentiator for Apple in this era of generalized privacy violations. Oh, and that is assuming the announced apps will eventually manage to be sandboxed this time, and this is far from certain: I still remember back in 2012 the saga of apps that were worked on to be sandboxed, only for the developers to eventually have to give up…

I mean, Apple could have done it: the user base was in the right mindset (I did not see a lot of negative reactions when news of the unified desktop user experience got broken by the press a few months ago, which was in fact Marzipan, the initiative to run UIKit on the desktop), developers would obviously have been less enthusiastic but could be convinced with “Benefit from being one of the first native apps!” incentive, influential users could be convinced by selling it as a privacy improvement (remember: in Mac OS X unsandboxed apps can still read all the data of sandboxed apps), etc. But this year they explicitly prompted the question in order to answer it in the negative, meaning no such thing is going to happen in the next few years, and in fact on the contrary investing in alternative solutions like Marzipan. Sorry Apple, but I can’t help but think of Copland 2020.

A quickie because everyone’s mentioning it: France’s finance minister Bruno Le Maire announced he’d be suing Apple and Google for anticompetitive behavior with regard to people developing apps for their respective smartphone platforms. Here is the source (via).

The translation in the Bloomberg article (via) is more or less correct, with the exception that Bruno Le Maire only mentions “the data”, not “all their data”. So you’re not missing out on much by not being able to listen to him in the original French.

Now as to the contents of the announcement… I sure hope the actual suit is drawn from better information than what we’ve been given here, because while I’m on the record as deeming the current system of exclusive distribution through an app store (something which Google isn’t even guilty of) as being unsustainable in the long run, to have any hope of improving the situation through a suit Apple should be blamed for things it is actually doing. For instance, developers do not sell their wares to Apple (or Google) by any definition of that word, they do have to use a price grid but have full latitude to pick any spot in that grid, and Apple at least does not get that much data from apps.

Beyond that, I believe there could be a case here, but I see many more matters where Apple could be, shall we say, convinced to act better through public action from consumer protection agencies, antitrust agencies, or tax enforcement agencies. Why aren’t there announcements about those too? At any rate, I’m not going to breathlessly pin my hopes on that action until I get more, and more serious, information about it.

Perhaps a bit lost in the noise of last week’s announcements was the release of iTunes 12.7, which removes iOS app management (oh, and ringtones, too): you can no longer buy iOS apps on the desktop, or update them, or sync the ones you bought to your device except in an ad hoc way.

I admit I was taken by surprise. I heavily use these features: in principle, I do not download apps or app updates directly to my iPhone or iPad (there are exceptions): if I am at home with WiFi, I consider I might as well use my Mac, and elsewhere I’d rather not eat into my WAN bandwidth cap, battery life, etc. Plus, I indeed find iOS app browsing in the built-in (iOS) App Store app to be a substandard experience. Yes, some of us still don’t buy into the idea that the handheld device is necessarily self-sufficient; I mean I’d very much like to see you add freely distributed music (which as a result is not in the iTunes store) to your iPhone music library, or back up your iPhone to a non-Internet backup location, using solely the iPhone itself. As long as I can’t do that and have to sync, might as well use sync for everything (and honestly, I don’t mind sync per se).

And of course, speaking as a developer-adjacent person, I have to wonder what the impact is when potential customers who come across a link to an iOS app while browsing the web on their desktop… can no longer buy it there. There will be lost sales until Apple improves the situation (QR codes would be a start, for instance).

Now thinking about it more, I may be able to live without this feature. I don’t reorder apps on the iPhone screen from iTunes, app thinning means that even with two devices, my bandwidth use should even be lower (compared to downloading the “fat” app or app update as I do today), I haven’t tried to keep superseded version of apps just in case an update would ruin it, I will search and discover apps on the device if I have to (the main trouble in this scenario being, for me, the lack of free trials — that is not changing), I haven’t switched devices in a long time (though that might change in the next few months)…

So I’ll try it out. After one last sync, I will later today update iTunes and I will see if I miss anything. Maybe iOS 11 will help, maybe it won’t, maybe Apple will improve the experience (I wouldn’t hold my breath — iOS 11 features are already known, normally).

But as with yesterday’s post, my biggest worry is for historical preservation. What happens, in the long run, for apps that are no longer being sold in the iOS App Store? Will they only remain on devices where they were bought, with no chance of being able to transfer them on a different device? But I fear this is the last of Apple’s worries…

At the risk of ruining my credibility both as a webcomic specialist and as a long-time member of the Mac community, I have to admit I only discovered the Joy of Tech at the occasion of this Foxtrot strip paying homage to webcomics. “The Ecstasy of Tech? I get the others, but what could this possibly refer to?”

Of course, I found out soon enough, and I’ve been following the Joy of Tech ever since. Through the various news around Apple, or around the tech industry in general, or even completely unrelated matters, they are here to bring a little joy to our lives. I have used one of their comics once while paying homage to Fake Steve, and while I also wrote they come close to, but aren’t, the Penny Arcade of Apple and the Tech industry, that is only because, in my opinion, Nitrozac and Snaggy are too damn nice for their work to be considered satirical…

Nevertheless, the Joy of Tech is performing a duty that I haven’t seen anyone else fulfill: topical humor on Apple and the tech industry in general. On that, they are pretty much the only game in town, which means they get drafted (with little attribution…) whenever media is looking for humoristic commentary, especially of the graphical kind, on tech events. Take, for instance, the time France 5 (French public TV channel) used them to illustrate the acquisition of Instagram (I was the one who tipped off Nitrozac and Snaggy about it). And yet, whenever I stroll back the memory lane and browse old JoT strips, remarkably they hold up much better than, say, Penny Arcade strips do; and to me it’s because they are not just about the immediate event at hand, but more generally tell things about us Mac and tech aficionados.

I have always had an inkling that Mac gaming must have influenced gaming in general, if only because of the many user interface innovations the Macintosh pioneered in the marketplace: they are bound to have allowed game designers to innovate in turn, building upon the Mac interface itself. However, I have not come across many mentions of such an influence in practice, in no small part because of the long-standing disparagement and prejudice against Mac gaming in general, which resulted in this not being reported on and studied in the way it should have.

But Richard Moss will be doing just that with his book project, The Secret History of Mac Gaming. And he needs your help making it a reality; granted, it has funded by now, but it is not too late to bring your contribution and make it even better, I just did. Please help show how the Mac did matter in the history of gaming.

Now that the most important Apple release of WWDC has been dealt with, we can cover everything else. I haven’t followed as closely as previous years (hence no keynote reactions on Twitter), but to me here is what stands out.

The Apple App Stores policy announcements

As seen at Daring Fireball for instance, Apple briefed the press on many current and coming improvements to the Apple App Stores (iOS, Mac, tvOS, watchOS). This actually happened ahead of WWDC, but is part of the package. There are a lot of good things, such as for instance the first acceptance that Apple isn’t entitled over the whole lifetime of an app to 30% of any purchase where the buying intent originated from the app with the 85/15 split instead of 70/30 for subscriptions after the first year. However, none of this solves the lack of free trials: if only subscription apps can have free trials, then thanks, but no thanks. I want to both try before I buy and avoid renting my software, and I don’t think subscriptions make sense for every app anyway, so improvements and clarifications (e.g. indication of whether the app is “pay once and play” or ”shareware” or ”coin-op machine”) to apps using non-recurring payment options would be welcome (more on that in a later post). Also, while those apply to the Mac App Store as well, this one will need more specific improvements to regain credibility. I don’t have much of an opinion on the new search ad system.

The new Apple File System (APFS for short)

Apple announced a new filesystem, and to say that it has, over the years, accumulated a lot of pent-up expectations to fulfill would be the understatement of the year. I can’t speak for everyone, but each year N after the loss of ZFS my reaction was “Well, they did not announce anything this year, it’s likely because they only started on year N-1 and can’t announce it yet because they can’t develop such a piece of software in a yearly release cycle, so there is not use complaining about it as it could be already started, and will show up for year N+1.” Repeat every year. So while I can scarcely believe the news that development of APFS only started in 2014, at the same time I’m not really surprised by it.

I haven’t been able to try it out, unfortunately, but from published information these are the highlights. This is as compared to ZFS because ZFS is the reference that the Mac community has studied extensively back when Apple was working on a ZFS port in the open.

What we’ll get from APFS that we hoped to have with ZFS:

A modern, copy-on-write filesystem. By itself, this doesn’t do much, but this is the indispensable basis for everything else:

Snapshots, or if you prefer, read-only clones of the filesystem as a whole. Probably the most important feature, by itself it alone would justify the investment of a new filesystem to replace HFS+.

While the obvious use case is backups, particularly with Time Machine, it is not necessarily in the way you think. Currently, when Time Machine backs up a volume, it has to contend with it being in use, and potentially being modified, while it is being backed up; if it was required to freeze a volume while backing it up, you wouldn’t be able to use it during that time and, as a result, you would back up much less often and that would defeat most of the purpose of Time Machine. So Time Machine has no choice but to read a volume while it is being modified, and as a result may not capture a consistent view of the filesystem! Indeed, if two files are modified at the same time, but one was read by Time Machine before the modification and the other after, on the backup the saved filesystem will have one file without the modification and the other with, which has not been the state of the filesystem you intended to back up at any point in time. In fact, this may mean the data is lost if you have to reload from that backup in case neither half can work with the other as a result.

Instead, with APFS the backup application will be able to create a snapshot, which is a constant time operation (i.e. does not depend on how much data the volume contains) and results in no additional space being taken, at least initially, then can copy from that snapshot, while the filesystem is in use and being modified, and be confident that it is capturing a consistent view of the filesystem, regardless of where the data is being saved (it could be to an HFS+ drive!). Once the copy is over, the snapshot can be harvested to make sure no additional space is used beyond that needed by the live data. Of course, this will also allow, by using multiple snapshots, to more efficiently determine what changed from last time, and with APFS on the backup drive as well the backup application will be able to save space on the backup drive, in particular not taking up space for redundancies the source APFS drive knows about already. But snapshots on the APFS source drive will mean that, after 10 years, Time Machine will finally be safe: this is a correctness improvement, not merely a performance (faster backups and/or taking less space) one.

Real protection in the face of crashes and power loss events. HFS+ had some of that with its journal, but it only protected metadata and came with a number of costs. APFS will make sure its writes and other filesystem updates are “crash-safe”.

I/O prioritization. A filesystem does not exist merely as a layout of the data on disk, but also as a kernel module that has in-memory state (mostly cache) that processes filesystem requests, and the two are generally tied. I/O prioritization, some level of it at least, will allow some more urgent requests (to load data for an interactive action for instance) to “jump the queue” ahead of background actions (e.g. reads by a backup utility), all the while keeping the filesystem view consistent (e.g. a read after a write to the same file has to see the file as modified, so it can’t just naively jump over the corresponding write).

Multithreaded. In the same vein of improvements to the tied filesystem kernel module, this will allow to better serve different processes or threads that read and write from independent parts of the filesystem, especially if multiple cores are involved. HFS+, having been designed at the time of single-processor, single-threaded machines, requires centralized, bottleneck locks and is inefficient for multithreaded use cases.

File and directory hierarchy clones. Contrary to snapshots, clones are writable and are copied to another place in the directory hierarchy (while snapshots are filesystem-wide and exist in a namespace above the filesystem root). The direct usefulness is less clear, but it could be massively useful as infrastructure used by specialized apps, version control notably (both for work areas and repositories).

Logical volume management. Apple calls this “space sharing”, but it’s really the possibility to make “super folders” by making them their own filesystem in the same partition, and allows this super folder to have different backup behavior for instance.

Sparse files. Might as well have that, too.

What APFS will provide beyond ZFS, btrfs, etc. features:

Encryption as a first class feature. Full disk and per-file encryption will be integrated in the filesystem and provided by a common encryption codebase, not as layers above or below the filesystem and with two separate implementations. This also means files that are encrypted per-file will be able to be cloned, snapshotted, etc. without distinction from their unencrypted brethren.

Crazy ZFS-like scalability. For instance, APFS has 64-bit nodes, not 128-bit. This is probably not unreasonable on Apple’s part.

RAID integration as part of the filesystem. APFS can work atop a software or hardware RAID in traditional RAID configurations (RAID-0, RAID-1, RAID-10, RAID-5, etc.), but always as a separate layer. APFS does not provide anything like RAID-Z or any other solution to the RAID-5 write hole. That is worth a mention, though I have no idea whether this is a need Apple should fulfill.

Deduplication. This is more generally useful to save space than clones or sparse files, but is also probably only really useful for enterprise storage arrays.

What is unclear at this point, either from the current state or because Apple may or may not add it by the time it ships:

Whether APFS will checksum data, and thus guarantee end-to-end data integrity. Currently it seems it doesn’t, but it checksums metadata, and has extensible data structures such that the code could trivially be extended to checksum all data while remaining backwards compatible. I don’t know why Apple does not have that turned on, but I beg them to do so, given the ever-increasing amounts of data we store on disks and SSD and their decreasing reliability (e.g. I have heard of TLC flash being used in Apple devices); we need to know when data becomes bad rather than blindly using it, which is the first step to try and improve storage reliability.

Whether APFS is completely transaction-based and always consistent on-disk. Copy-on-write filesystems generally are, but being copy-on-write is not sufficient by itself, and the existence of a fsck_apfs suggests that APFS isn’t always consistent on-disk, because otherwise it would not need a FileSystem Consistency checK. Apple claims writes and other filesystem updates will be “crash-safe”, but the guarantees may be lower than a fully transactional FS.

Whether APFS containers will be able to be extended after the fact with an additional partition (from another disk, typically), possibly even while the volumes in it are mounted. APFS support for JBOD, and the fact APFS lazily initializes its data structures (saving initialization time when formatting large disks), suggest it, and it would be undeniably useful, but it is still unknown at this time.

Whether APFS will be composition-preserving when it comes to file names. It will, certainly, be insensitive to composition differences in file names, like HFS+; however HFS+ goes one step further and normalizes the composition of file names, which ends up making the returned file name byte string different from what was provided at file creation, which itself subtly trips up some software like version control (via Eric Sink), and which is probably the specific behavior that led Linux founder Linus Torvalds to proclaim that HFS+ was “complete and utter crap”; see also this (latter via the Accidental Tech Podcast guys, who had the same Unicode thoughts as I did). Won’t you make Linus happy now by at least preserving composition, Apple? This is your opportunity!

Whether APFS uses B+trees. I know, this is an implementation detail, but it’d be neat if Apple could claim to have continuously been using B-/+trees of either kind for their storage for the last 30 years and counting.

Apple File Protocol deprecation

Along with APFS, Apple announced it would not be able to be served over AFP, only SMB (Windows file sharing), and AFP was thus deprecated. This raises the question over whether SMB is at parity with AFP: last I checked (but it was some time ago), AFP was still superior when it came to:

metadata and

searching

But I have no doubt that, whatever feature gap is left between SMB and AFP (if there is even one left), Apple will make sure it is closed before APFS ships, just like Apple made sure Bonjour had feature parity with AppleTalk before stopping support for AppleTalk.

Playgrounds on iOS

I’m of two minds about this one. I’ve always found Swift playgrounds to be a great idea. To give you an idea, back in the day when the only computer in the house was an Apple ][e, I did not yet know how to code, but I knew enough syntax that my father had set up a program that would, in a loop, plot the result of an expression over a two-axis system, and I would only have to change the line containing the expression, with the input variable being conveniently x, and the output, y; e.g. to plot the result of squaring x, I would only have to enter1:

60 y = x*x

run the program, and away I went. It was an interesting lesson when, due to my limited understanding of expressions, specifically that they are not equations, I once wrote:

60 2y = x+4

Which resulted in the same thing as I previously plotted, because this command actually modified line 602 (beyond the end of the loop)… good times.

Anyway, Swift playgrounds, which automatically plot the outcome of expressions run multiple times in a loop for instance, and even more so on iPad where you have the draggable loop templates and other control structure templates, provide the necessary infrastructure program out of the box, and learners will be able to experiment and visualize what they are doing in autonomy.

These playgrounds will be able to be shared, but when I hear some people compare this to the possibilities of Hypercard stacks, I don’t buy it. There is nothing for a user to do with these playgrounds, the graphic aspect is only a visualization (and why does it need to be so elaborate? This is basically Logo, you don’t need to make it look like a Monument Valley that would not even be minimalistic); even if the user can enter simple commands, it always has to start back from the beginning when you change the code (which is not a bad thing mind you, but shows even the command area isn’t an interactive interface). You can’t interact with these creations. Sharing these is like sharing elaborate Rube Goldberg constructions created in The Incredible Machine: it’s fun, and it’s not entirely closed as the recipient can try and improve on it, but except watching it play there is nothing for the recipient to do without understanding the working of the machine first.

Contrast that with Hypercard, in which not only you set up an actual interface, but what you’d code was handlers for actions coming from the interface, and not a non-interactive automaton. This also means that it was much less of a jump to go from there to an actual app, especially one using Cocoa: it’s fundamentally just a bunch of handlers attached to a user interface. It’s a much bigger jump when all you’re familiar with is playgrounds or even command-line programs, because it’s far from obvious how to go from there to something interactive. Seriously, I’m completely done with teaching programming by starting with command-line apps. It needs to die. What I’d like to see Apple try on the iPad is something inspired by the old Currency Converter tutorial (unfortunately gone now), where you’d create a simple but functional app that anyone could interact with.

The review for this Wednesday is for an unexpected, shall we say, release: it doesn’t appear to have been solicited through Diamond1 beforehand, and so the first comic book coming from Apple Inc. as a publisher, at least first in recent history, came as a complete surprise to everyone. It was released at the same time as many news from Apple, so it took me a bit of time to notice it, then get to it.

Before we begin, if you’ve followed this blog for a bit, you might have noticed I have a bit of a thing for comics, be it in previousposts or the comicroll and the pull list in the sidebar; or maybe you’ve been following some of my otherendeavors or follow me on Twitter and have been left with little doubt that I do read and enjoy comics very much. So this is where I’m coming from on comics in general.

I also have a lot of appreciation more specifically for comics as teaching aids: it is to me a very suitable medium for teaching, and there is a lot of unjustified prejudice against this art form as being not for serious purposes, whatever that means. This is completely wrong, as can show the generally cheesy, but not bad teaching comics I read as a child, and it goes for grownups too, as the cartoons from Larry Gonick show (a nice trove of which can be found here, thanks Jeff), or more recently those Dante Shepherd is commissioning with a dedicated grant: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 (so far); hat tip to Fleen. So this comic from Apple could, if well done, help with general understanding of what they are trying to accomplish with these guidelines.

I also understand that, as a developer who has followed Apple’s policies relatively well and have some expertise in interpreting them, and who reads a few specialists in Apple kremlinology, I may not actually be in the target audience. I have little doubt that the app review team and DTS are interacting daily with many, many developers who discover the guidelines when their app gets rejected for violating them and/or have a very incomplete picture of the whole of the guidelines and/or are are very stubborn about what they think their “rights” are; this comic is probably intended for them. Lastly, the link to this comic has been provided to me by people I trust, and it is hosted in a CDN domain that Apple uses for a variety of developer-related resources (e.g. Swift blog post images), so I have little reason to doubt its authenticity.

Get on with it!

Ok, ok. This comic is actually sort of an anthology, split in five parts, and the first is:

Safety

With art by Mark Simmons. In a setting and style reminiscent of Jack Kirby’s cosmic works (New Gods in particular), we find the hidden son of Flash and the Silver Surfer as the hero of this story, in which he has to cruise through space, avoiding a number of hazards, after he encounters some sort of Galactus-like planet eater. Will he succeed in time?

I found the story rather hard to follow, no doubt due to the unfamiliar setting, and had to reread it a few times to make sure I hadn’t missed anything; beyond that, the art serves its purpose, unfortunately the tests clearly isn’t here to support it.

Performance

With art by Ile Wolf and Luján Fernández. In a more playful style, two schoolchildren in uniform are battling using Pokémon/Digimon/kaiju (circle as appropriate), and the battle appears to have grown out of control. The situation is dramatic, and it’s not sure there is anything that can stop them.

At least here any ambiguity as to the situation is intentional, but even then it’s hard to take it seriously when the text (speech or narration) takes you out of the climax; not everyone can be a Stan Lee and add text after-the-fact that works well with such a story. And while the conclusion of “Safety” in part explains its title, I can’t help but think its hero would have been more appropriate to star in the “Performance” section.

Business

With art by Shari Chankhamma. A more intimate setting with interesting art where we follow the growth of a boy through times good and bad, but always in the same place: the barbershop he patronizes.

Maybe the most interesting of the stories in this anthology, and it’s too bad they couldn’t come up with text that was to the level: either do away with it, or hire better writers! Who edited this stuff?

Design

With art by Ben Jelter. Foraging in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with an art style to match, a boy locates and manages to repair a robot who may or may not be related to Wall-e and Eve.

It’s a section for which developers for Apple platforms have understandably high expectations, but I don’t know if they’ll be met with the robot design, or with the art in general, which is nothing special. The less said about the text, the better.

Legal

With art by Malcolm Johnson. A noir/private eye story, all in greyscale, and interestingly starring a woman.

The art style is surprising in a good way for such a story, but it does not do a very good job of carrying the story, and as we’ve seen, no point in counting on the text for that either. At least this one has more relationship with its claimed subject matter than the others do.

Conclusion

What… in… the… ever-loving… frick? This comic may have the dimensions and approximate page count of a comic issue, but is, to be blunt, a crushing disappointment. Its only point, it turns out, is to put pictures which tell their own stories around the exact words of the official document, without any attempt at adaptation, or even just, say, recontextualization of the guidelines as an exchange between two characters. These words don’t benefit in any way from being told there. Meanwhile, the pictures just follow their own scenarios and tell their own stories without any consideration for what is supposedly spoken in the bubbles: there is no correspondence either thematic or in pace between the events depicted and the words you can read. There is no teaching benefit whatsoever to these comics, and no way I see anyone at any knowledge level benefit from reading it, let alone be enlightened as to the profound meaning of the guidelines. It’s as if bubbles were randomly placed, linked so that each would overflow into the next, then the text of the guidelines was just dumped into them. This shows better than anything I have previously seen that sequential art is more than the sum of pictures and text.

Verdict: download it, but don’t read it, and only use it in a few years to remind your interlocutor who works at Apple that this has been a real thing that Apple has released, in order to embarrass him.

Diamond is the only distributor to comic book stores in North America, and comics appear in its catalog a few months before being available, in case you’re not familiar with that aspect of the comics industry.↩

So I thought I’d also mention the promotion to top leadership of Johny Srouji, promotion which to me represents the rise of semiconductor engineering inside Apple. Far from shedding this skill (as it might have appeared to some at the time of the Intel transition), Apple doubled down on it: in the domain of system glue (chipsets), peripheral controllers, sensors, etc., but also going as far as to design its own processors, both at the RTL level (with the acquisition of PA Semi) and at the RTL to mask translation level (with the acquisition of Intrisity); something Apple never did (as far as we know, anyway) for 68k, PowerPC, or any other processor they used prior to ARM. With impressive results, particularly now with the iPad pro.